Snapped: Adventures in Snapdragon Dev Kit Recovery (Premium)

Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows at Build 2024 back in May, offering developers a high-end Snapdragon X configuration in a (previous generation) Mac Mini-like form factor. But you know this story: After months of silence and delays, Qualcomm finally canceled the product in October, but not before shipping a few hundred units--for free--to the first who preordered it.
I never understood the point of this product. Developers who need to target Windows 11 on Arm with their apps should use a real Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PC, not because they're readily available, but because they are laptops with touch displays. What developers should be doing, as part of their testing, is seeing how their apps perform on real-world hardware. To this day, there's no such thing as a Snapdragon X desktop PC, and even when that's no longer true, laptops will remain the mainstream form factor.
That, and the several Snapdragon X-based PCs I received for review, plus the one I bought, explain why I never ordered the Snapdragon Dev Kit. I do a lot of my app development work on these Snapdragon X laptops, and Visual Studio and the apps I make work perfectly well on this platform. Having a high-end version of it in a desktop form factor isn't necessary.
But it is interesting. Qualcomm makes 12 variants of its Snapdragon X system-on-chip (SoC) for PCs, and the most powerful of them, the Snapdragon X1E-00-1DE found in the Dev Kit, is elusive and almost impossible to find in shipping PCs. Plus, I am a fan of small form factor (SFF) PCs, especially NUCs. And with Windows 11 on Arm winning me over this year thanks to its performance, compatibility, reliability, and efficiency, the Dev Kit is an interesting nexus of things I like.
If you watch Windows Weekly, you know that Leo and Richard both purchased Dev Kits back when preorders went live over the summer. And that each waited for months for it to arrive. Arrow Electronics, which manufactured the Dev Kit for Qualcomm, would occasionally email them and other customers with humorously off-base shipping estimates. And then one day, out of nowhere, they shipped. And then Qualcomm canceled the product and refunded both of them. Nice.
Leo offered to ship me the Dev Kit after he experimented with it a bit, so I of course accepted. And it arrived Monday, right after my brutal all-weekend stretch of work, in a bit of bad timing. But I planned to get started immediately nonetheless. So I unpacked the Dev Kit, finding the PC, its large external power supply, and the promised USB-C-to-HDMI dongle in the box along with two tiny pamphlets, one of which with two QR codes for documentation that no longer exists. And off I went.
Well, not exactly.
Leo didn't reset the Dev Box before shipping it, so it booted into the lock screen of an already configured PC. Not a problem, I thought. I know a bit about Windows and, more specifically, Windows recovery. And I had prepared for this moment by creating a Windows r...